The National Road Safety Partnership Program (NRSPP) offers a collaborative network for Australian organisations to build and implement effective road safety strategies in the workplace.

The program offers organisations the resources to improve road safety that best fit their individual operations and, at the same time, improve business productivity through less time and money lost through safety incidents.

The program is not a prescriptive approach but aims to complement existing safety legislation by providing access to a ‘knowledge bank’ from a diverse network of organisations to given them the resources to implement their own initiatives. The tools will help make the business case for organisations shifting their safety focus from 'having' to safety to secure a contract to 'wanting' to because it is simply good business.

Comparing heavy vehicle safety management in Australia and the United States

Heavy vehicle transport safety regulation has been evolving to align with a “duty of care” legislative framework. Conventional transport regulation enforcement (of driver compliance with road rules and vehicle compliance with standards) is still necessarily in place, but “rules compliance” regulators and the transport industry alike are grappling with the need to monitor whether transport operators are meeting their duty of care by putting in place effective safety management practices and systems.

Abstract

Heavy vehicle transport safety regulation has been evolving to align with a “duty of care” legislative framework. Conventional transport regulation enforcement (of driver compliance with road rules and vehicle compliance with standards) is still necessarily in place, but “rules compliance” regulators and the transport industry alike are grappling with the need to monitor whether transport operators are meeting their duty of care by putting in place effective safety management practices and systems.Recently Trucksafe, the Australian Trucking Association’s (ATA) alternative compliance schemeand the Australian Logistics Council’s (ALC) National Logistics Safety Code, wererecognised as codesof practice that could be used in a “reasonable steps” defence under the Victorian Road Act. But as Hopkins[1]points out, it is relatively easy to determine after an incident whether a “reasonable” effort was made to manage safety. The challenge is to measure the sufficiency of safety management practices when crashes have not occurred and to codify the evidence of this in a way that enables consistent enforcement practices, the latter being particularly more difficult.This paper aims to identify the ways that transport safety regulation is evolving and compares the approaches in transport safety monitoring and measurement in Australia and the United Statesof America. The differences in these approaches and the evidence of the effectiveness and challenges in each approach may be instructive for policy makers considering reviewing and changing regulatory frameworks.